You have your 360 in my Wii! Tiger Woods ad pulled in UK

EA was found to have used 360 game footage in an ad for the Wii version of …

The Advertising Standards Authority in the UK has forced Electronic Arts to pull an ad for the Wii version of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, which was deemed misleading. The ad depicted Woods playing the game with a Wii remote, except the in-game footage was actually taken from the Xbox 360 version. A viewer complained that this creates a false impression about the graphical quality of the Wii version of the game.

Despite the use of the Wii controller, as well as the Wii branding at the end of the commercial, EA explained that the use of the phrase "available on all formats" should lead consumers to believe that the commercial isn't tied to one specific console. As for why they didn't use footage from the Wii game, EA told the ASA that it wasn't "of broadcast quality," making the 360 version the preferable choice.

Ultimately, the Wii branding throughout the ad led the ASA to uphold the complaint and force EA to pull the ad. "Because viewers would not be able to achieve the graphical quality shown in the ad on a Wii console," the ASA statement explained, "we concluded that the ad was misleading." The ultimate decision was that the ad could not be aired again in its current form.

This was kind of a shady move on EA's part: if you show someone playing a game with a Wii remote, they're going to assume that's the version of the game they're looking at; switching between the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions isn't quite as problematic. We say if a game doesn't have graphics that are good enough to show on television, they're probably not good enough to put in a $50 game.